I, Spot

Being the Reflections of a Thoughtful Rat Terrier

INSTALLMENT I

BITS AND PIECES

CHAPTER 1

Of my early life in Connecticut I have but little memory. My mother, I am sure, did the best she could. Blind I was and deaf – deficient too, even in my ability to detect strong scent. My brothers and sisters were likewise half-baked, yet while we squirmed against each other for what I imagined to be the admirable purposes of mutual warmth and protection, they, older and larger and emboldened by these advantages, were none too kind, given freely to shoving and pushing in their efforts to provide themselves nourishment without concern for my well-being. For all their help I might have starved.

When later, I recognized the sounds made by human beings held some significance, despite the limited range of expression compared to barks, growls and yips, what appealed to me about humane languages was the lack of nips on the ear and thrusts of the snout and the use instead of the comma, period and parentheses (a favorite of mine) to punctuate discourse. At home in Connecticut, however, nuanced shoves were the accustomed means of communication within my family. (Not always successfully. My father met his fate attempting to herd a Chevrolet Impala a month or so before my birth.)

Within the family tradition then, distributing jabs with my infant nose, by luck and persistence in applying to my mother I survived the next few weeks of my existence sufficiently fattened and sharpened in my senses, enough to see and hear and smell that there were fewer of my brothers and sisters to avoid. They had been removed, beginning with the larger more demanding of the females, taken to places distant and unknown

Our litter of six was down to myself and an obnoxious older brother practically twice my size when, on a fine November day, the first of that month in the year 1999, from out of the barn where I lay innocent among shredded copies of what I now realize were back issues of The Hartford Courant I was placed into the arms of He Who Has Become the Object of My Devotion. I began trembling immediately, and could not stop, despite his caresses, shaking uncontrollably with fear at what was next to happen. He held me to his heart; I could sense that he was worried for me. The thought passed through his head that when I died in my old age I would shiver in just this same way. Even as I caught his scent for that first time, I caught, too, his morbid and sentimental thought, and fell sorry that he should be of such a mind at his first sight of a puppy to be thinking of a dying dog.

One croon of his stood out, enough that we both had the sense to recognize my name. And so it was he first called me that which I knew then I was (as I know now I am), that is to say: I, Spot.

CHAPTER 2

Upon first acquaintance with He who has become the Object of My Devotion, I, Spot was taken into what I knew no better at that time than to suppose a wheeled box. Bounced south for several hours at an unexpected speed I lost the struggle to retain the contents of my always delicate stomach just at the moment we crossed a high bridge leading to the island of Manhattan.

The smells on that island were so rich, the variety of terriers so startling that I was little short of befuddled. A sniff of the gutter and a sip of water proved prelude to my lodging in a carrying case little bigger than a common cardboard box. A rag within retained some final memory of my mother’s scent. He who would become The Object of My Devotion slept across the way, within sight, and I, being young and drowsy, was too confused to claim my right to be in the same bed and with the same – if not better -- pillow, sheet, and blanket as he. Even so I slept soundly .

At break of dawn, released from my confinement, I committed the error of quickly and neatly exercising my bodily functions on a copy of History’s Mysteries a magazine spread open upon the floor for that purpose. The Object of My Devotion fell into rapture. By bits and pieces, I grew to understand the obsession he would have with the activities of my bowels as well as his relationship with History’s Mysteries Magazine, his employer, as it turned out.

It occurred to me his curious pleasure derived from observation of my bowel movements might be heightened, and better still, used to my advantage, if withheld and granted selectively.

Within weeks I had him trained to satisfy his obsessions in the street where others might see and reinforce his delight sliding torn-out pages of History's Mysteries beneath my squatting form.

The reader will have noticed that I was lucky in the Object of My Devotion. His natural desire to love and be loved was easily channeled to a terrier’s understanding that to be loved one needs love another and, further, that this is demonstrated not only by croons and caresses, but by bending one’s will to another’s, in this case, of course, my own.

CHAPTER 3

My labors composing the book you hold before you (the process of which I shall enter into elsewhere) reinforce what I observed in my youth: that the habits of an historian working at home are, of necessity, sedentary and placid. It was the daily practice of The Object of My Devotion to scribble, then read aloud what he’d written, scribble again, then recite again. Other than my name, I did not at first consider the noises he made as having any value beyond say, a cough or a sneeze, yet over time I became convinced that his muttering must be in someway significant, for I recognized a gleam in his eye similar to that of a terrier digging in the sand. I concluded the variations in sound, as with digging, were insistent attempts to get at something. It was but a short step to deduce that these sounds held meaning: indeed the varying sounds meant the same thing, though rephrased to curry favor with History’s Mysteries editors. Given the daylong repetition of say, 500 words on the subject of the Easter Islands, for example, or the Chamorro Indians, in short time I mastered these subjects as well as the varied vocabularies used to discuss them.

I did not, I confess, make a connection between scribbling and recitation. Tapping a keyboard or scratching paper with a stick seemed to me preparatory exercises for recitation, like circling the grass before lying down on it. Nor at this time had I learned to read; my access to books was limited owing to my height (eleven and a half inches at the top of the shoulders) and lack of opposed thumbs (a problem in other ways as well). Nevertheless, listening intently I acquired a working knowledge of our specialty: the maritime history of Portugal in the 16th century and the discovery of the Great Western Sea.

Interest in the Pacific Rim ran high in these days and The Object of my Devotion cracked under the strain of supplying demand. I was curled-up eyes closed weighing the relative merits of “the Easter Islands comma home of mystery comma” with “the home of mystery comma the Easter Islands comma” when I heard him shriek “What do you think, little mouse?” Given no time to reply I was flung into the air and caught. This is what I thought:

True it is that I am relatively small: half the standard Rat Terrier’s size, and technically speaking a miniature Rat Terrier, though thank goodness not a toy. Yet, even if I were, what of it? Is the size of our soul to be measured by the size of its container? Have I not sight, sense, feeling enough for a mastiff? Do I not long for pleasure, avoid pain, hope for improvement, fear disaster? The breath of life invigorates me as much as it does The Object of My Devotion, and small though I may be, I am as big in soul as he.

Denigration, I thought, must immediately cease. I hastened to deliver a reprimand he would remember.

CHAPTER 4

I’d noted that to win favor with the editors at History’s Mysteries the Object of My Devotion worked to achieve what might be called heightened expression. The Chamorro Indians, for instance, weren’t merely hungry in the afternoon, but blood-thirsty savages. Queen Isabella wasn’t absent-minded, but criminally insane.

Adopting this style, rather than representing myself as mildly annoyed (which was the case) that he had not the sense to let sleeping dogs lie, when he reached to toss me a third time I instantly assumed a pose of Burning Sorrow (accented judiciously with a little trembling). His hands dropped away, he was abashed. From then on I knew what I must do to make myself understood: dramatize.

Properly chastened, he returned to revising some filler about the Solomon Islands. Given his receptive mood, I further trained him to receive me properly on his lap, where cushioned against his belly I continued my studies.

Fortified with knowledge as I have set forth, within a year of my birth I attained my full stature: eleven and a half pounds handsomely distributed on a frame eleven and a half inches high at the withers. As with proper tri-color Rat Terriers, my head is principally black, my body principally white. My ears are big, magnificently so: black, large and upright. My chest is broad and white, curving up to a thin high belly. An irregular black shape marks my right side. From the crown of my brow to my wet black nose a thin white stripe divides the halves of my wedge-shaped head. Apricot-colored cheeks highlight the deeper brown of my eyes. My toes are long and elegant. Beyond the reach of memory, my tail was clipped to a fashionable length. Its black tip crowns a white stub set in a circle of black on my otherwise white rump.

As my studies grew wider research involved personal hardship. The Object of My Devotion must, for obvious reasons, sometimes listen to Hawaiian music. Hawaiian music, as all know, is an open invitation for dog abuse. No sooner do the strains of the ukulele fill the air then to the rhythm of the islands The Object of My Devotion sets me to hula: forcing me upright onto my back legs and swaying my hips in time to the charmless tunes. Indulgently, I wiggle to the beat for if I have learned anything I have learned to endure what cannot be changed. On the whole it was worth it. My readers shall soon know why.

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